I'm pretty happy with this gun. As usual, thanks go to the Spear America staff for good customer service and courtesy rigging.
The (really) Good:
- Easy to load (3-setting roller floater anchor for primary band + roller tab on included shaft)
- Very easy to wrap (larger D'Angelo II line retainer; nice muzzle tabs for easy and reliable multi-wrap)
- Very stealthy/streamlined
- All-around comfortable. Low band and gun profile makes for easy swimming and fairly easy tracking, and the ambi handle is, to me, a significant improvement over the molded right/left-handed ergo grips on some Pathos guns.
The Bad
- Pathos official vertical reel guides the line right across the primary band on the bottom, potentially causing extreme wear on the band when feeding reel line under tension, requiring either extra care when feeding reel (which I am not usually in a position to take while getting spooled) or some kind of additional guide/offset to get the line off of the band. Haven't solved this problem yet.
- The muzzle seems to have notches designed to be wrapped with Dyneema or similar more flexible cord. Monofilament shooting line won't make the tight turns required to firmly secure the shaft to the rail on the muzzle end. Not necessarily a gun problem, but the muzzle seems specifically designed without mono in mind. I would prefer the freedom to use mono without such a significant sacrifice.
The Ugly:
- Shaft whip out of the box (with mono shooting line) is extreme. I almost eliminated the problem with a typical roller double wishbone, but the characteristically tiny Pathos band loops made this highly impractical to the point that I opted to tie new band inserts to get the new and improved wishbone on it. Not a huge pain as the longer wishbone gave me the slack to cut the ends off of the stock band without changing the stretch profile much, but I'm perplexed that a conventionally pretty nice gun like this would simply not work out of the box because of a fairly well-documented and well-understood roller gun pitfall. I still get a bit of whip at higher power after fixing the wishbone issue which I'm inclined to attribute to the mono-unfriendly muzzle, but realistically I think I'll need to switch to braided shooting line to use this gun as intended. More testing required.
Overall, I'm still glad I bought it, but the light technical work required for basic use of the gun seems a little silly. If you aren't willing or able to tune it, buy a traditional rail gun or something. But if you are, this is a pretty a decent mid-high end value buy for a roller gun.
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